SYMBOLISM OF THE ROSE IN MASONRY
Would “a rose by any other name smell as sweet”? Very likely it
would. The connection between the way a word sounds and the qualities of the
idea behind the word is tenuous. But when a noun like “rose” comes to have
symbolic resonance, there is, in the beginning of the symbol making process, a
close connection between the qualities of the object and the characteristics of
the symbol it represents. Later, as the symbol takes on an intellectual life of
its own over time, the connection between the symbolic meanings and the essence
of the thing itself may fade from consciousness. But the most powerful symbols
are the ones where that connection is still bright.
Roses have been around for a long time. The
oldest fossil record of a plant clearly identifiable as a member of what the
botanists call the genus Rosa comes from a Colorado rock formation dated
to between 35 and 32 million years ago. The rose first appeared as an artistic
motif in Asian documents around 3000 B.C. The first record of a
European-looking rose is a stylized rendition in a fresco from the 16th century
B.C. on the Greek island of Knossos. Homer pointed out in the “Iliad” (ninth
century B.C.) that Achilles’ shield was decorated with roses. And Confucius
claimed that during his lifetime (he died in 479 B.C.), the Emperor of China
already had in his library 600 books about the cultivation of roses.
Early roses had only five petals, and legend says
the original color was always white. The ancient Greeks believed that roses
turned red when Venus chased after her lover, Adonis, and pricked her finger on
a thorny bush in her haste to reach him. According to Christian documents, the
blood of the crucified Christ spilled down onto a white rosebush growing at the
foot of the cross and ever afterwards, rose blossoms were red instead of white.
The simple structure of the early roses featured a
fairly large golden center with the five petals blown wide open. The
descendants of these roses are still grown today and sold in nurseries as “shrub
roses.” They have lots of short-stemmed flowers and lots of thorns and not much
perfume.
It appears that roses changed little in structure
until fairly recently. When the British houses of Lancaster and York were
fussing over who really deserved to control the monarchy, each family used a
rose (red for the Lancastrians and white for the Yorkists) as its symbol. Their
artistic renditions of the rose in heraldry, battle flags, and shields show, for
both families, virtually identical versions of the five-petaled wild rose, wide
open. When Henry VII came to power at the end of the War of the Roses in 1485,
he “married” the warring factions by combining their red and white roses to
create the two-tone Tudor Rose, the symbol of his reign and also the symbol of
England today.
Though the rose started out fairly simple, as
man’s understanding of the possibilities of plant hybridization increased,
people began to press this life form to become more complex. The roses we buy
from the florist today fall into the class called “modern roses” and the type
called “hybrid teas.” They have very long, stiff stems; strong, fairly big
thorns; and between 70 and 120 petals. Their hearts, which remain gold, are
completely enclosed by those petals until quite late in the life of each
individual bloom. Eventually, however, they do open far enough to expose the
heart to view.
The roses grown for perfume-making come from the
class called “essence roses” and have a much stronger scent than the any of the
modern class. Essence roses don’t make such pretty blossoms, but the scent they
produce is important to the entire cosmetics industry. Japan’s Shiseido
cosmetic company set perfume scientists on the trail of the makeup of this
complex scent and found that the smell we identify as “rosy” contains no fewer
than 540 different aromatic elements! There appears to be a great deal more
going on with roses than meets the eye.
Not surprisingly, as rosarians worked to breed the
complex rose flowers prized today, they gave up certain genetic pluses as a
tradeoff. For instance, the old shrub roses are practically disease free and
grow in all sorts of semiarid climates without irrigation. Hybrid teas, on the
other hand, require watering, fertilization, and all sorts of chemical
interventions to stay free of blackspot (a fungal pathogen) and produce
blemish-free flower heads. Shrub roses bloom all summer; hybrid teas make a
single big show, usually in May or June, and then typically go on vacation until
the following spring. Old roses really smelled sweet; some moderns don’t smell
at all.
How big a deal is all this? How much are
Americans obsessed with roses? It happens that my employer, the U.S. Department
of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, is responsible for
inspecting all the imported cut flowers that come into this country from
abroad. This gives me access to some amazing numbers. In 1998, the latest year
for which we have figures, from Mexico alone, we imported a whopping 28,397,249
individual roses.
Our national love affair with the rose, despite
its finicky nature in the garden and its absurdly high price at the flower shop,
strongly argues for the fact that we get an emotional kick from this kind of
flower that no other provides. In short, roses are working for us on more than
just the visual and olfactory levels. There is something deeply embedded in our
psyche that calls out to this flower. Roses are putting us in touch with our
collective past and with the Divine. They can do this because the rose has
become, across the centuries, a powerful symbol.
The rose was beloved of the mother of our order,
Isis. Cleopatra understood its power: when she set up her first meeting with
Marc Antony, she arranged for the floor of the room to be strewn with rose
petals. The records show this carpet of roses was 15 inches thick. The most
beautiful woman of India, the goddess Lakshmi, is reputed to have been born from
a rose comprised of 108 large and 1,008 small petals. There is a repeated
thread associating the rose with the process of birth beyond India, as well.
Rose petals fly through the air in Botticelli’s famous painting “Birth of
Venus,” for instance.
In Christian iconography, the rose is associated
with Rebirth. Our fellow seekers, the Rosicrucians, employ the mature
but not fully opened rose at the center of the Cross as the emblem of their
order. In a famous speech delivered May 10, 1785, the Comte de Cagliostro, the
founder of Egyptian masonry, declared that the Rose-Cross is the ancient and
true symbol of the Mysteries. So the emblematic significance of the rose comes
very close to us as masons.
Linguists long ago noted that the word “rose” is
an anagram for Eros, physical lovemaking and the attraction for opposites that
literally makes the world go ’round. But just as sexual attraction leads to
reproduction of the species, so Eros devolves into that other, nonsexual kind of
love expressed originally by the Greeks and coopted by the Christian religion as
“agape.” The passion of the honeymoon is displaced over time by the more
enduring love of the parent for the child. Interestingly enough, the flower
sacred to Venus became the flower of that very nonsexual demigoddess we call the
Virgin Mary: she is called the Rosa mystica in medieval texts.
Is there a sense in which the rose is still
mystica today? After all, we give each initiate into our order a single,
slightly opened long-stemmed red rose. We tell the new Apprentice that this
blossom represents our love for him or her as a brother or sister, welcomed into
the larger family of the Craft.
Then what happens? The rose opens up over the
following few days and dries out and dies. The peak of its beauty is short
lived. Late in its life cycle, the rose reveals its heart. Eventually it
breaks down into dust.
This cycle is emblematic of the process of
self-actualization that begins with our ceremony of initiation. As the
candidate undergoes the changes stimulated by the “antique beverages” of memory
and forgetting, she dies to her old life and is born again through the
renunciation of vice and the embrace of virtue. In the beginning, the true core
of the self is hidden from examination behind many layers of protective gear,
just as the heart of a young rose is concealed by its petals.
Over time, however, the initiate peels back those
layers of protection because there is a categorical imperative operating within
masonry: it is simply mandatory to look into your own heart of darkness in
order to expunge the evil there and replace it with the Light. Nothing else
will do.
In the fullness of enlightenment, we may hope
that, like the mature rose, it is possible to exist in the real world with our
hearts exposed to view. We should be able to give up whatever thorns we use to
protect ourselves from genuine contact, heart to heart, with other people. But
before we reach that stage, where we can love others, we must learn to let
ourselves be loved. Our older sisters and brothers give us that rose as a sign
that they already love us even though we are greatly defective. They love us,
in short, without our being at that moment much worthy of it. Freemasonry has
made it possible for them to see the heart of gold inside us when we still
cannot see it for ourselves.
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